On Airflow 2.3.x, airflow db init and airflow db upgrade failed against MariaDB when upgrading from 2.2.5. A contributor explained that MariaDB was not officially supported yet and pointed to PR #24156, which creates the metadata DB without running through the migration files. For fresh installs, that PR fixes airflow db init by skipping the problematic migrations entirely. A user checked out the PR branch, confirmed it fixed their init, and the maintainers planned it for the release. So on MariaDB with 2.3, use a build containing PR #24156 for fresh installs.